Anyone reading the headlines in the morning newspaper can be forgiven for believing that Indians have lost their capacity for reasonable thought. A few days ago, we read that audiences of a Bollywood film, Chaava, went into strong hysterics at the sight of the actor, the dishy Akshay Khanna, playing Aurangzeb. Then we read that ten mosques in Uttar Pradesh’s Sambhal have been covered in plastic and canvas sheets because they happen to fall in the way of a planned Holi procession. 

The Lost Art of Thinking in an Age of Manufactured Outrage - The Wire 

The implications are obvious, processions rapidly turn into mobs, and mobs run amuck destroying everything that offends their rather ‘delicate’ sensibilities. These days anything can offend, a piece of meat, a particular sort of beard, women’s clothing, magnificent structures that were constructed in times of the Mughals, and of course mosques.

At a time when China is making giant strides towards becoming a super-power, when India is poised for economic decline, and when democratic and human development indicators are rapidly falling, Indians are embroiled in these petty wars over religion and a history that goes back 300 years. 

This is extremely convenient for the ruling class because no one has the time to question unemployment and the dismal state of education in our country. They are too busy lamenting over manufactured historical wrongs. But what of us Indians? Have we lost the capacity to even think? Looks like it.

Think of the importance of thinking without necessarily going into the merits or demerits of Descartes’ famous aphorism ‘I think therefore I am’. Let us recollect Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that grants the right to freedom of thought, belief and worship. The right to freedom of thought is, arguably, of enormous import. Thinking about or thinking through a personal or a political predicament: a movie we watched, a piece of music we listened to, a book we read, a conversation we had, our emotional experiences, or just about the minutiae of everyday life sparks off chains of critical reflection. 

by Neera Chandhoke

16/03/2025

https://openingdoorz.com/bombay-riots-and-blasts/ 

https://www.republicworld.com/india/ranjani-srinivasan-deported-scholar-journey-and-controversial-exit-from-the-us   First it was Soros, now every other scholarship, whose alumni protested..

Columbia University student 𝗥𝗮𝗻𝗷𝗮𝗻𝗶 𝗦𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗶𝘃𝗮𝘀𝗮𝗻, was mocked as a "fleeing Urban Naxal" by right-wing social media in India, in posts that shared a US Homeland Security surveillance footage showing her lugging a bag at a NY airport.. ..Her student visa was revoked suddenly by the Trump administration, apparently for participating in protests at Columbia last year against the carnage in Gaza and US support for Israel.

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𝑁𝑒𝑤 𝑌𝑜𝑟𝑘 𝑇𝑖𝑚𝑒𝑠 reports :

By Luis Ferré-Sadurní and Hamed Aleaziz
March 15

The first knock at the door came eight days ago, on a Friday morning.

Three federal immigration agents showed up at a Columbia University apartment searching for Ranjani Srinivasan, who had recently learned her student visa had been revoked. Ms. Srinivasan, an international student from India, did not open the door.

She was not home when the agents showed up again the next night, just hours before a former Columbia student living in campus housing, Mahmoud Khalil, was detained, roiling the university. Ms. Srinivasan packed a few belongings, left her cat behind with a friend and jumped on a flight to Canada at LaGuardia Airport.

When the agents returned a third time, this past Thursday night, and entered her apartment with a judicial warrant, she was gone.

“The atmosphere seemed so volatile and dangerous,” Ms. Srinivasan, 37, said on Friday in an interview with The New York Times, her first public remarks since leaving. “So I just made a quick decision.”

Ms. Srinivasan, a Fulbright recipient who was pursuing a doctoral degree in urban planning, was caught in the dragnet of President Trump’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian demonstrators through the use of federal immigration powers. She is one of a handful of noncitizens that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has targeted at Columbia in recent days.

In the week since that first knock at the door, Ms. Srinivasan says she has struggled to understand why the State Department abruptly revoked her student visa without explanation, leading Columbia to withdraw her enrollment from the university because her legal status had been terminated.

On Friday, while considering her future in Canada, she received some answers.

The Department of Homeland Security issued a statement that characterized Ms. Srinivasan as a terrorist sympathizer and accused her of advocating violence and being “involved in activities supporting Hamas, a terrorist organization.” The department did not provide any evidence for its allegations.

Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, posted surveillance footage on social media that showed Ms. Srinivasan lugging a suitcase at LaGuardia as she fled to Canada. Secretary Noem celebrated Ms. Srinivasan’s departure as a “self-deportation.”

“It is a privilege to be granted a visa to live & study in the United States of America,” Secretary Noem wrote on X. “When you advocate for violence and terrorism that privilege should be revoked and you should not be in this country.”

Ms. Srinivasan’s lawyers have vehemently denied those allegations and have accused the Trump administration of revoking her visa for engaging in “protected political speech,” saying she was denied “any meaningful form of due process” to challenge the visa revocation.

“Secretary Noem’s tweet is not only factually wrong but fundamentally un-American,” Naz Ahmad, one of Ms. Srinivasan’s lawyers, said in a statement, adding: “For at least a week, D.H.S. has made clear its intent to punish her for her speech, and they have failed in their efforts.”

In response to questions, officials with the Homeland Security Department said that when Ms. Srinivasan renewed her visa last year, she failed to disclose two court summonses related to protests on Columbia’s campus. The department did not say how the summonses made her a terrorist sympathizer.

“I’m fearful that even the most low-level political speech or just doing what we all do — like shout into the abyss that is social media — can turn into this dystopian nightmare where somebody is calling you a terrorist sympathizer and making you, literally, fear for your life and your safety,” Ms. Srinivasan said in the interview on Friday.

Ms. Srinivasan’s current situation can be traced back to last year, when she was arrested at an entrance to Columbia’s campus the same day that pro-Palestinian protesters occupied Hamilton Hall, a university building. She said she had not been a part of the break-in but was returning to her apartment that evening after a picnic with friends, wading through a churning crowd of protesters and barricades on West 116th Street, when the police pushed her and arrested her.

She was briefly detained and received two summonses, one for obstructing vehicular or pedestrian traffic and another for refusing to disperse. Her case was quickly dismissed and did not result in a criminal record, according to her lawyers and court documents. Ms. Srinivasan said that she never faced disciplinary action from the university and was in good academic standing.

“She was taken in with roughly 100 other people after being blocked from returning to her apartment and getting stuck in the street,” said Nathan Yaffe, one of her lawyers. “The court recognized this when it dismissed her case as having no merit. Ranjani was just trying to walk home.”

Ms. Srinivasan said she did not disclose the summonses in the visa renewal form later in the year because her case had been dismissed in May and she did not have a conviction.

“Because I had not and the charges were dismissed, I sort of marked it as ‘no,’” she said. “But maybe that was my mistake. I would have been happy to disclose that, but just the way they had questioned us was sort of assuming that you had a conviction.”

The State Department has broad discretion to revoke student visas, which it typically does if someone overstays or the government discovers fraud; convictions and arrests can also lead to revocations. Immigration lawyers said it was highly unusual for ICE to descend on college campuses searching for students with recently revoked visas as the agency has the past few days at Columbia, rattling many students.

“It is more rare for the government to act the way it has, such as in the cases in Columbia University, where they’re going on campus and conducting an operation to apprehend somebody,” said Greg Chen, a lawyer at the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

The Trump administration’s targeting of students with visas at a university enveloped in a cultural firestorm opened a new front in the president’s attempts to ramp up deportations and tamp down pro-Palestinian views. The president canceled $400 million in grants to the university after accusing it of failing to protect Jewish students. The arrests and attempted detentions of the Columbia students has led to an uproar among Democrats and civil rights groups.

Jason Houser, a senior ICE official during the Biden administration, said that “criminalizing free speech through radicalized immigration enforcement is a direct attack on our democracy.”

Last week, ICE arrested Mr. Khalil, a green card holder who had become a leading face of the pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia. Mr. Trump hailed the arrest as “the first of many to come.” On Friday, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it had arrested Leqaa Kordia, who had been involved in the protests at Columbia. Federal officials said she had overstayed her visa and had previously been arrested at a Columbia protest in April.

Unlike Mr. Khalil, Ms. Srinivasan said she was not an activist or a member of any group that organized demonstrations on campus.

Ms. Srinivasan said she was an architect who came to the United States from India as part of the Fulbright program in 2016 and that she enrolled at Columbia in 2020. She said she was in the fifth year of an urban planning doctoral program at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and was supposed to graduate in May.

She said that her activity on social media had been mostly limited to liking or sharing posts that highlighted “human rights violations” in the war in Gaza. And she said that she had signed several open letters related to the war, including one by architecture scholars that called for “Palestinian liberation.”

“I’m just surprised that I’m a person of interest,” she said. “I’m kind of a rando, like, absolute rando,” she said, using slang for random.

It was March 5 when she received an email from the U.S. Consulate in Chennai, India, indicating that her visa had been revoked. The notice did not provide a reason, saying only that “information has come to light” that may make her ineligible for a visa.

Confused, she emailed Columbia’s office for international students the following day seeking guidance. An official informed her that the revocation would take effect only if she left the country and that she could remain in the United States to pursue her studies for the time being, according to emails reviewed by The Times.

The next morning, on March 7, Ms. Srinivasan was on a call with an official from the international student office when the federal agents first knocked on the door of her apartment, which is off campus but operated by Columbia. The official told Ms. Srinivasan to call campus security, while her roommate engaged with the agents from behind the closed apartment door.

In an interview, her roommate said that the agents had initially identified themselves as “police,” declined to provide their badge numbers, saying they feared they would be doxxed, and stood to the side of the door so that they were not visible through the peep hole. The roommate, a fellow Columbia student who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear for her safety, said that the building’s doorman, who is an immigrant, later told her that he had let the three agents into the building because he was frightened.

Ms. Srinivasan abandoned the apartment that night, so she was not there when officials returned the following evening. Her roommate once again refused to open the door to let them in and recorded audio of the interaction, which she shared with The Times.

“We were here yesterday,” one of the officials says, believing he was talking to Ms. Srinivasan because the roommate had not identified herself. “We’re here today. We’re here tonight. Tomorrow. You’re probably scared. If you are, I get it. The reality is, your visa was revoked. You are now amenable to removal proceedings.”

The official stressed that he and his colleagues were not trying to break the law, that she would have the right to go before an immigration judge and left a phone number for the Homeland Security Department that she could call if she had “a change of heart.”

“That’s the easiest and fastest way to do this, as opposed to you being in your apartment and us knocking on your door every day, which is just silly,” he said. “You’re a very smart person. It’s just not — it’s not worth it.”

The next day, Ms. Srinivasan received an email from Columbia saying that homeland security had alerted the university that her visa had been revoked and her legal status in the country had been terminated. Because she had to immediately leave the United States, the email said, her enrollment at Columbia had been withdrawn and she had to vacate student housing.

The email, signed by the university’s international student office, said that, in compliance with its legal obligations, Columbia was asking her to meet with the homeland security agents. The university declined to comment on Ms. Srinivasan’s case.

On Thursday night, three federal agents returned to Ms. Srinivasan’s apartment with a search warrant signed by a judge and went inside to search for her, according to her roommate and lawyers.

By then, Ms. Srinivasan was already in Canada.

India may not be the promised land for Elon Musk  https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/telecom/telecom-news/india-may-not-be-the-promised-land-for-elon-musk/articleshow/119038423.cms?from=mdr industry experts believe direct-to-cell satellite broadband is unlikely to disrupt India's wireless market due to several factors. Firstly, the technology still faces technical challenges, such as difficulties in maintaining reliable smartphone connectivity due to power and antenna limitations. Secondly, Starlink depends on telecom providers for access to 4G/LTE spectrum, making it reliant on existing networks. Lastly, satellite internet generally delivers slower and less reliable performance c ..

Airtel and Jio mobile users may find Starlink services more affordable than opting directly from the Elon Musk-owned satcom company, industry executives and experts have told ET. 

India's telecom regulator plans to recommend that satellite broadband spectrum be allotted for around five years to assess initial market adoption, defying Elon Musk's Starlink, which is seeking a 20-year permit, a senior government source has told Reuters.

The government has directed Starlink to establish a control centre in India, TOI reported. This move aims to enable authorities to suspend or shut down communication services in sensitive or troubled areas when necessary to maintain la ..

The Global VHP’s Trail of Violence  https://www.wearesavera.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/The-Global-VHPs-Trail-of-Violence-v2.pdf   The VHP-A often positions itself as an exclusively religious organization that represents a minority community:  which draws on the very protections
won by social movements to build a multicultural, pluralistic society.. both the VHP in India and its American wing act in clear contrast to these principles.  it has platformed extremists, attacked progressive movements and civil society actors, and collaborated with other supremacist and anti-democratic forces

'Left’s dark money network...': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKw15wIRea8 Tyler O’Neil  books Wokeness on  USAID’s ‘long history’ with George Soros 

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/world-news/lefts-dark-money-network-tyler-oneil-exposes-usaids-long-history-with-george-soros/videoshow/118605540.cms 

U.S. Congressional meeting of the special committee on government efficiency, titled "The Last America: How Foreign Aid Undermined U.S. Interests Around the World." In this session, O'Neil claimed that the Open Society Foundations and USAID worked together to support the East West Management Institute, which received $31.2 million in USAID funding. He noted that these funds were allegedly used to target and undermine the democratic leader in Albania.

Nehru's Vision and India  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0EFT5CjFDM   Aditya Mukherjee  Manthan India  how many critical aspects of the vision of our freedom struggle, called the ‘Idea of India’ stand compromised today. In that context the attempt will be to go back to Nehru’s legacy

https://www.youtube.com/c/ManthanIndia

This abiding concern for the most precise label -- "fascist", "proto-fascist", "semi-fascist" or "neo-fascist" -- to me, appears to be a bit funny. It, perhaps, emanates from a certain type of intellectual laziness and the fond belief that once the right label is determined, the right solution is very much available on the shelf, if only we care to search. The holy texts do offer solutions to all problems, but for that we have to find the right label.

For them, Lenin's advice: concrete analysis of the concrete problem. Even Italian Fascism and German Nazism were not exactly the same. Mussolini was captured by his country people and treated like a despised criminal. Hitler committed suicide to avoid being captured by the Allies. He was perhaps still popular among the Germans. Anyway, both had to be defeated by external forces. They were, to be sure, not defeated by any "Popular Front".
Right here in India, the authoritarian rule of Indira Gandhi was ousted electorally by a mishmash coalition of hard Right, Centre and Pink Left -- backed by the bulk of the Reds. Not exactly a "Popular Front".

The issues of the moment need to be clearly identified. The threats and opportunities properly diagnosed.
Far more crucial than an endless chase for the right label. Sukla Sen, <https://www.facebook.com/share/p/15UipcT8sQ>

India’s left-right centenary

Jawed Naqvi

COMMUNIST parties in India are quibbling over the characteristics of fasc​ism, wondering if Antonio Gramsci’s views on the scourge from his Italian experience are relevant to the challenge of vacating the threat in the country. The debate comes at a time for the communist movement as it marks 100 years of its transformation into an organised Communist Party of India (CPI) in the leather and textiles working class hub of Kanpur in 1925.

Not entirely by coincidence, the seeds of India’s organised fascist movement also sprouted the same year with the founding of the Hindu revanchist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Its political branch, the BJP, is ruling India for a third consecutive five-year term under the dubious leadership of Narendra Modi. The RSS was inspired by both Mussolini and Hitler who its leaders had described as the model for dealing with India’s minorities. It’s thus the centenary year of India’s left-right battles, though tragically for the left, the journey also witnessed moments of self-harming collusion with the right.

In the first general elections in 1952, communists became the main opposition to Nehru’s Congress. Since then, they have had their electoral highs and lows. In the recent polls, they were reduced to the margins, not far from being rendered negligible in the electoral fray that shores up Indian democracy. Their vote share against Nehru’s 50 per cent in India’s first elections was 3.29pc, but they had 16 seats over the next opposition group, the socialists, who won 12. By a quirk of India’s electoral system, although the socialists had fewer seats than the communists, they had a higher vote percentage of 10.59pc. In the 2024 elections, three communist parties won two seats each, none in West Bengal, with a joint national vote share of an embarrassing 2pc.

On their day, the British beat Indian communists and jailed their leaders, most notably following the infamous Meerut conspiracy case when its Hindu, Sikh and Muslim leaders were charged with plotting to overthrow British rule. The Hindu right at the time had become apologists for colonialism. Arun Shourie in a new book on V.D. Savarkar, author of the Hindutva doctrine, describes Savarkar’s numerous apologies to the British from his jail, offering to work for them if released. Hindutva’s hatred of Gandhi was not less than that of Nehru. On his part, Nehru instinctively assessed Savarkar’s Hindutva and its kindred spirit, the RSS, as a graver challenge to secular India than the communists.

The colonial experience spurred communist partisans to launch a gallant but eventually botched liberation war in 1946 in the province of Telangana, part of the Nizam’s feudal territory. Many poets, writers and actors cut their teeth in the romance of the peasant struggle against feudalism. The CPI spawned a cultural renaissance of progressive theatre, cinema and literature in the movement. The Telangana uprising ended tamely in 1951, and the party split in the 1960s in keeping with a familiar communist habit.

Impelled by the Telangana fiasco, the focus of communist leaders gravitated to electoral politics. It resulted in the world’s first elected communist government in Kerala. Since then, most communist leaders have embraced the provinces of Bengal and Kerala as their hub for struggle, where electoral success was more readily attainable.

When a political contingency offered communists a chance to rule the country, not just their two provinces, and have their leader Jyoti Basu as prime minister following inconclusive elections in 1996, the party developed cold feet. An Urdu verse aptly describes their terror: “Woh ghareeb dil ko sabaq miley ki khushi ke naam se dar gaya/ Kabhi tum ne hans ke jo baat ki to hamara chehra utar gaya” (Courting adversity and fear of failure/ I was pulverised by the prospect of happier tidings.) Basu would describe the party’s refusal to accept the challenge as a historic blunder.

A desirable quest for the increasingly marginalised communist parties at the current juncture, to the ordinary Indian’s mind, should be to help re-establish the secular democracy the nation had set out to be. In seeking this goal, the communists would be required to work, kicking or screaming, with willing bourgeois allies who are numerically stronger than them. Naturally, the more radical ideologues would for their own legitimate reasons see this as an embarrassment if not an outright betrayal of their elusive revolution. Do they have a better plan?

The current discussion on fascism arose from the reluctance of the Communist Party of India (Marxist, CPI-M) to accept that the country is already in the throes of the scourge under Modi’s regime. Instead, ahead of its party congress in April, it speaks of features of neo-fascism as stalking the country — features.

The CPI-M has lost power in the tribal state of Tripura to the BJP, West Bengal to Mamta Banerjee with room for the BJP to grow stronger. It is tenuously holding on to power in Kerala where its challenger, Rahul Gandhi’s Congress expects to win the state polls in mid-2026. Gandhi is working hard to defeat the twin challenges of BJP’s oligarchic rule and against its polarising hostility towards Sikhs, Muslims and Christians and less open support for assaulting Dalits.

The Communist Party of India (Marxist Leninist), a smaller but more militant offshoot of India’s communist struggles, posits that the country is likely facing full-blown fascism, and that it is time to collectively mint a strategy to combat and defeat it. Being equidistant from the BJP and the Congress was once the CPI-M’s convenient stand. It allowed the BJP’s vertical rise to power. How long would the CPI-M continue to fight INDIA allies in West Bengal and Kerala and hope at the same time to join an opposition campaign to defeat fascism, or by whatever name it chooses to call the challenge? A hundred years of communist movement in India should have given the party all the time it ever needed to learn how not to score self-goals.

Published in Dawn, March 11th, 2025

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Ankita_Bhandari  

https://cdn.countercurrents.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/A-Fact-Finding-Report-on-the-Murder-of-Ankita-Bhandari.pdf 

(Open Letter of Supreme Court Advocate Colin Gonsalves On Supreme Court's Refusal to Entertain Petition for CBI Enquiry into murder of Ankita, a young girl who was killed while employed in a hotel run by a BJP leader's close relative in Dehradun.)

I’m sorry, Ankita that your case in the Supreme Court seeking a CBI investigation into your murder was disposed of and we have not yet managed to catch the main culprit. I’m sorry Ashutosh, fearless journalist and Petitioner before the Court that you have had to suffer victimisation for investigating this case and had FIRs filed against you and also suffered the victimisation of your wife by way of her transfer. I’m sorry Soni Devi, for the death of your darling daughter by a VIP who asked for “special services” from Ankita, a young girl working in the hotel. Her refusal led to her murder. 

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